“Lucy Biederman has wound together a charming, modern day Book of the Dead that comments on all things important and interesting. Walking the aisles of Biederman’s imagination is an absolute treat; it’s no surprise that this little book of experimental fiction has made waves since its conception.”–Newpages
My experimental fiction The Walmart Book of the Dead, the Vine Leaves Press Vignette Award Grand Finalist, was published in October 2017. It is a finalist in the fantasy category for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year. The painting on the cover is by the brilliant painter Brendan O’Connell. Necessary Fiction cites its “24-karat prose”; at Heavy Feather Review, Jimmy Ardis writes, “When we are angry with loved ones, with institutions, with entire governments, and wonder how human decency fell off a cliff, Biederman’s The Walmart Book of the Dead serves as a capable roadmap.”
You can order the book on Amazon here. For more information about it, you can listen to an interview that WCPN, Cleveland’s NPR station, did with me, here. Other news about me and the book, like upcoming readings, events, and interviews are at my blog.
A vastly imagined Wonderbook–fearsome, hilarious, familiar and arcane–in which a brilliantly savaged Walmart, both a temple and a tomb, spawns an epidemic of pharonic proportions, exhausting nothing less than everything. An extraordinary experience.
–Rikki Ducornet, author of The Deep Zoo and Brightfellow
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot writes, reflecting the ultimate despair of modernism. Lucy Biederman’s fragments in her vibrant The Walmart Book of the Dead, by contrast, celebrate the comic hopelessness of the present. Composed from dozens of interwoven articulations by the undone, many wandering the wide, brightly lit aisles of necropolis, the resultant mosaic reveals contemporary existence in its vast unliving: its temporary stabilities and irreversible debilitations, pointless impulses and inexplicable enervations, preening proprieties and mute indigence, the pomposity of clerks and the humilities of the destitute, and many more which present a multifaceted vision, wavering and provisional, but for that all more alive. Unlike Dante’s inhabitants in The Inferno, Biederman’s denizens of the other realm do not realize they have passed, nor are they aware that they are in dire need of such instructions, such spells and illustrations as the ones you likely hold in hand. Shantih shantih shantih
–Skip Fox, author of wired to zone and Sheer Indefinite
Lucy Biederman 